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Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work Hardcover – Bargain Price, May 28, 2009

by Matthew B. Crawford (Author)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 1,592 ratings
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A philosopher / mechanic destroys the pretensions of the high- prestige workplace and makes an irresistible case for working with one's hands

Shop Class as Soulcraft brings alive an experience that was once quite common, but now seems to be receding from society-the experience of making and fixing things with our hands. Those of us who sit in an office often feel a lack of connection to the material world, a sense of loss, and find it difficult to say exactly what we do all day. For anyone who felt hustled off to college, then to the cubicle, against their own inclinations and natural bents, Shop Class as Soulcraft seeks to restore the honor of the manual trades as a life worth choosing.

On both economic and psychological grounds, Crawford questions the educational imperative of turning everyone into a "knowledge worker," based on a misguided separation of thinking from doing, the work of the hand from that of the mind. Crawford shows us how such a partition, which began a century ago with the assembly line, degrades work for those on both sides of the divide.

But Crawford offers good news as well: the manual trades are very different from the assembly line, and from dumbed-down white collar work as well. They require careful thinking and are punctuated by moments of genuine pleasure. Based on his own experience as an electrician and mechanic, Crawford makes a case for the intrinsic satisfactions and cognitive challenges of manual work. The work of builders and mechanics is secure; it cannot be outsourced, and it cannot be made obsolete. Such work ties us to the local communities in which we live, and instills the pride that comes from doing work that is genuinely useful. A wholly original debut, Shop Class as Soulcraft offers a passionate call for self-reliance and a moving reflection on how we can live concretely in an ever more abstract world.
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Previous page
  1. Reading age
    1 year and up
  2. Print length
    256 pages
  3. Language
    English
  4. Dimensions
    5.86 x 1 x 8.58 inches
  5. Publisher
    Penguin Press HC, The
  6. Publication date
    May 28, 2009
  7. ISBN-10
    1594202230
  8. ISBN-13
    978-1594202230
  9. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Philosopher and motorcycle repair-shop owner Crawford extols the value of making and fixing things in this masterful paean to what he calls manual competence, the ability to work with oneÖs hands. According to the author, our alienation from how our possessions are made and how they work takes many forms: the decline of shop class, the design of goods whose workings cannot be accessed by users (such as recent Mercedes models built without oil dipsticks) and the general disdain with which we regard the trades in our emerging information economy. Unlike todayÖs knowledge worker, whose work is often so abstract that standards of excellence cannot exist in many fields (consider corporate executives awarded bonuses as their companies sink into bankruptcy), the person who works with his or her hands submits to standards inherent in the work itself: the lights either turn on or they donÖt, the toilet flushes or it doesnÖt, the motorcycle roars or sputters. With wit and humor, the author deftly mixes the details of his own experience as a tradesman and then proprietor of a motorcycle repair shop with more philosophical considerations. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine

We note that Publishers Weekly named Shop Class as Soulcraft one of the top ten books of 2009. Reviewers were clearly intrigued by Crawford's argument, but only a couple of them seemed fully persuaded. (The New York Times Book Review critic, for example, admitted to enjoying Crawford's manual work alongside his academic career.) But most critics, while praising the book's overall premise, seemed a little hesitant about fully embracing Shop Class as Soulcraft, perhaps because, as the New York Times reviewer observed, many of the author's personal preferences and quirks, such as Crawford's defense of dirty jokes, seem to impede his argument. However, it's hard not to be interested in a philosopher who, in a nation that privileges intellectual attainment, can also successfully replace a carburetor.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Press HC, The; 1st edition (May 28, 2009)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1594202230
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1594202230
  • Reading age ‏ : ‎ 1 year and up
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.2 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.86 x 1 x 8.58 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 1,592 ratings

About the author

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Matthew B. Crawford

Matthew B. Crawford

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Matthew B. Crawford is a philosopher and mechanic. Currently a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, he owns and operates Shockoe Moto, an independent motorcycle repair shop in Richmond, Virginia.

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
1,592 global ratings
I gave this book to my son who has a ...
4 Stars
I gave this book to my son who has a ...
I gave this book to my son who has a BS in Economics from UCLA, but who loves to build things, houses and remodels. Manual skills are a gift and should be exploited, honored even.
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Top reviews from the United States

bookscdsdvdsandcoolstuff
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent and thought provoking
Reviewed in the United States on August 15, 2009
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Make no mistake, this book is no easy read. It is a work of philosophy by a man who has a Ph.D. in the field. Still, anyone with even a basic familiarity with philosophy can read it with profit. If one lacked such preparation all they would need is a good dictionary. A friend of mine who is in a Ph.D. program recommended it to me when we were talking about my dream of restoring a muscle car on my own. What a great book!

This work touches on many different areas: from education, to anthropology, to the nature of work itself. I found myself largely agreeing with it throughout, although I would quibble on a few of the details. For instance, if I am reading him correctly, the author seems to get the history of modern scientific method wrong, and seems ignorant of new work on the Middle Ages. For a philosopher this is problematic (how can a professional philosopher not thoroughly understand scholasticism and the history of monasticism?) but that is the state of the academy these days.

I am no scholar, just a teacher with interests in music, history, theology, and philosophy. However, I recently had some life changing experiences that this book really speaks to.

With our conversion to Catholicism, and the commensurate arrival of our third child, my wife informed me of the importance of her staying home with the children. She desired to home-school them to provide them with a classical education, and that meant changes in my life (I was a Catholic school teacher at the time).

I had to leave my job in favor of public schools in order to make the necessary income for her to stay home, but that was only the first step. Expenses had to be cut, and drastically. I have had to find ways to save money and make it on one salary. The brakes were going on my car and I did NOT want to put the bill on my credit card.

A guy at Church told me that disk brakes were easy. I should do them myself. I bought a couple of books, looked on-line for vehicle specific directions (Auto Zone has a GREAT website), bought a ratchet set and got to work.

My friend was right. I replaced brakes and rotors and bought tools and books at it cost me less than it would have cost at a facility to get the brakes and rotors done for me. Plus, I was equipped to do it again and again.

That was just the beginning. She wanted new cabinets in the kitchen. I had to build them. My mom's car needed new plugs and wires. I had to do it (she lives with us and is on a fixed income). I have had to make MAJOR changes, and the biggest one is that I rarely have the money to hire people. I am redoing the back porch. I have been amazed at how much I love the process of doing all this work myself.

And, the thing is, I am truly happiest when I am doing this work. There is no time when I am more at peace than when I am trying to tackle a difficult new problem. My respect for the trades (and the men and women in them) has grown immensely. I am fortunate to love my job as well, but I really do believe that had I known what I know now about how fulfilling, intellectually stimulating, and rewarding the trades are, I might have skipped the four year degree and the masters, picked up automotive and electrical at the local community college, and saved myself and bundle and been just as fulfilled.

This book put flesh on an idea and expressed competently knowledge that I had come across experientially. Had I the chance to do things differently I probably wouldn't, but if my son (or daughter) informs me that they love working on the car with me and would like to do it for a living, I will certainly encourage them in their vocation. Two years ago, my stupid snobbery might have prevented that.

Also, this book clearly communicates why many of the electricians and mechanics I have met are some of the smartest people I have spoken to.

In as much as I am in a position to do so, I will advocate from now on for a return of the manual crafts in the classroom. Any high school education that doesn't teach someone to work a little with wood, and little about their car, and a little about the plumbing in their house is really no education at all.
27 people found this helpful
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Captain Spaulding
5.0 out of 5 stars Beyond Left and Right
Reviewed in the United States on July 13, 2009
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This book will pose difficulties for most American readers outside acadaemia, because it represents a squaring of the circle on which most of us have been taught to plot "liberal" and "conservative". Crawford is neither liberal nor conservative by the standards of contemporary American political discourse. Instead, he draws on elements of classical Marxist and related social critique to reach conclusions that are not so different to those espoused by what Rod Dreher calls "Crunchy Conservatives". This is because Crawford, like Dreher's crunchy cons, espouses values that have been deliberately distorted or discarded in the rise of US-style corporate capitalism: the elevation of personal agency, responsibility, and work-identity over passive consumption, disengagement, and the destruction of responsibility through "flexibility".

This is a curious result: Marxists and American conservatives in agreement about something. It is understandable, however, if we go "back to the roots" of both viewpoints. Like Marx, Crawford is essentially a conservative, backward-looking utopian in rebellion against the dominant political economy of his day. Marx admired the pre-industrial agrarian/craftsman ideal of the unification of producer and product; Crawford's vision is of a Jeffersonian post-agrarian yeomanship rooted in the Stoic consciousness supposedly produced by the mechanical trades. Crawford and Marx both believe (rightly, I think) that political consciousness is to a certain degree "determined" by material conditions, i.e. the physical and sociological conditions of daily work. Marx, Crawford, and (one suspects) most crunchy cons would admire a universe in which the radical commodification of all aspects of human existence characteristic of contemporary capitalism has been eradicated, replaced by one in which most people can choose their work and become experts in it because it pleases them.

Concerning solutions, these utopian logics diverge. Marx's, famously, was to predict the intensification of worker alienation as a prelude to revolution and the magical reconstitution of society and economy; his followers (e.g. Lenin) perfected political means to help this "ineluctable" historical process along (a task whose irony was lost on most of them). Crawford recommends a deliberate re-valorisation of the manual trades (although he invariably means the mechanical trades) in both physical and philosophical terms. The "crunchy cons", on the other hand, have no obvious solution to embrace: simultaneously alienated and held captive by a system of commodity production and a political economy they don't fully understand, they retreat into wistfulness and boutique environmentalism.

All three viewpoints run up against the hard facts of power, and the almost limitless capacity of the "ruling class" - i.e. those who benefit from the evolving status quo - to manipulate it to its advantage. Crunchy cons cannot grasp that the rootsy, organic, self-responsible world to which they aspire was deliberately destroyed by the very system that their conservative political ideology helps preserve. Marx did not foresee that new forms of class domination could lie on the other side of proletarian revolution. And Crawford struggles to accept that his idiosyncratic vision cannot be generally realised within our globalised, hyper-commodified, corporate-dominated political economy.

The truth is that things won't really work out very well if everyone is trying to be a mechanical technician of some sort. Crawford admirably outlines the deliberate attempt, in the first half of the 20th century, to engineer the destruction of the craftsman-mechanic, but he doesn't really come to terms with the difficulties (economic or political) inherent in reversing it. Indeed, one suspects that Crawford's acknowledged omission of any serious economic interrogation of his thesis is due to the obvious contradictions of trying to do so. We can't all be motorcycle mechanics because the world is made up of much more than motorcycles - especially the vintage type that only aficionados can afford to maintain.

HAVING SAID ALL THAT, this is an absolutely wonderful book - one of the most powerful and resonant American polemics written in the last 20 years. It is beautifully written and often hilariously ironic. It is inspiring - not because it offers a way out of the contradictions of our commodified, stratified existence, but because it suggests an entry point for those trying to find one: finding common ground between those on the right and left who are divided only by the demagoguery that passes for political discourse in the USA.
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Top reviews from other countries

Milan
4.0 out of 5 stars The value of work
Reviewed in India on December 4, 2023
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Reading Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford reminded me of my then fascination with Marx in college. The dignity of labor and the ills of capitalism were very captivating topics to read and discuss. It went something like this: create new wants - people will want more money to buy things - they will work more - borrow more - the rich will keep getting richer.

In this book, the author talks about the value of work and what works means to different people. Crawford argues that society undervalues working with hands, and overvalues the so-called knowledge work. Though the writing can get tiring sometimes, he makes a few interesting points:

• Work is not just about earning, but also about finding meaning.
• People who work by hands feel pride in their work while those who are employed by the companies as white collar workers usually have no pride or sense of accomplishment.
• "Craftsmanship has been said to consist simply in the desire to do something well, for its own sake."
• Henry ford's assembly model has been detrimental to the workers as it has created a separation of thinking from doing.
• It’s very difficult to do meaningful work when you are working for someone else.
• The consumer culture has made us discarding functioning things for the shiny new objects.
• Corporates "desire for a mass of human resources," as they are exploitable because they are undifferentiated.
• Our work should be engaging, satisfying and productive.
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Cliente Amazon
5.0 out of 5 stars Shop Class is an important last-chance necessity
Reviewed in Spain on May 30, 2019
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Extraordinary reading.
Modernity, the other way around. How everything today seems to point to a 'heady' mentality sacrificing our hands-on experience and its wisdom, potency and learning possibilities.
Shop Class is an important last-chance necessity in our globalized compu-techy-nerdy reality. Idiocy by Apollonian inflation seems to be the mantra nowadays…
Mathew W. Crawford gets it right I think.
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Pip
5.0 out of 5 stars Fast shipping. Perfection
Reviewed in Australia on March 5, 2020
Verified Purchase
I received the book exactly when I expected it. I bought it off a recommendation from a friend. I look forward to enjoying it.
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Brad Tamlin
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book he hits the nail on the head! literally
Reviewed in Canada on July 18, 2013
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I really enjoyed this book. I am an Electrician by trade, and now teach at a College. Leaving the trade to start a new career as an educator has been a difficult transition for me. I also worked in the corporate world for some time. I identify with the comparisons the author makes with "The Crew versus the Team" When a tradesperson joins the ranks of academics it can be intimidating. The way the author explains philosphy and relates it to trades is very interesting. He convinces the reader that working with your hands and appling a skill is highly cognitative. The best quote in the book is " If you don't vent the drain pipe like this, sewage gases will seep up through the water in the toilet, and the house will stink of shit" I recomend this book highly to anyone who teaches trades or shop related classes. It is also a good read for Managers to get inside the head of your subordinates and understand how to manage effectively.
3 people found this helpful
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Aidan Nolan
5.0 out of 5 stars how his engineering of the production process was balanced by the engineering of consumption and easy credit to enslave workers
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 4, 2014
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This book is well worth the effort needed to read it. It is not a lightweight holiday read... Early on the book is a little heavy but develops well and puts into perspective our industrial development. It shows how Henry Ford destroyed craftsmanship by separating thinking from doing; how his engineering of the production process was balanced by the engineering of consumption and easy credit to enslave workers to a life of unsatisfying work. Wind forward in time and see how the same creeping separation of thinking from doing is undermining the professional occupations, where graduates find themselves doing unsatisfying work in modern production-line offices. Individual flair, decisiveness and accountability is undermined by endless meetings where everyone is responsible and no one is responsible. Crawford points out the disconnects between modern life and the real world and shows how and why people can regain some meaning in their lives by working with their hands. If you want to read something that will make you think and re-evaluate how you spend your working life... Do yourself a favour, get yourself a copy, read it and think about the messages it contains. Who was it that said "The unexamined life is not worth living"?
Incidentally, the book has nudged me into making a decision to change my job... by pursuing an aspect of my of my profession as a mechanical engineer which I have in the past enjoyed for its creativity. Need I say more..?
2 people found this helpful
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